Tuesday round-up

Posted Tue, June 4th, 2013 10:47 am by Sarah Erickson-Muschko

Yesterday the Court issued two opinions in argued cases and granted cert. in two new cases. At this blog, Kali Borkoski has posted the details on the two opinions here and here, while Max Mallory provided a round-up of yesterday’s early news coverage of the Court’s orders.

In Maryland v. King, a closely divided Court upheld a Maryland law that authorizes the collection of DNA samples from individuals arrested for “serious” crimes. Lyle Denniston reports on the opinion for this blog, observing that although it had been “quite commonly accepted that the Constitution does allow the police to take a DNA sample from everyone who has been actually convicted of a crime,” until yesterday the Court “had never extended that permission to a person taken into custody by police on suspicion of a new, unrelated crime.” Other coverage of the case comes from NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Tony Mauro of The National Law Journal (registration required), Josh Gerstein and Darren Samuelsohn of Politico, Richard Wolf of USA Today, Dominic Perella at MSNBC, Adam Liptak of The New York Times, and Robert Barnes of The Washington Post. Commentary on the decision comes from the editorial board of The New York Times, which criticizes the Court’s opinion as “severely undermin[ing] fundamental Fourth Amendment principles that protect individuals against unjustified searches and incursions on privacy by law enforcement”; Nicole Flatow also weighs in on the decision at ThinkProgress.

In Hillman v. Maretta, the Court unanimously held that a federal law which establishes a life insurance program for federal employees and allows an employee to designate a beneficiary to receive the proceeds of the policy when the employee dies preempts a Virginia law that allows the family of a deceased employee to sue the designated beneficiary for the proceeds if the beneficiary happens to be the employee’s former spouse. Tejinder Singh analyzes the Court’s opinion for this blog, explaining that “[t]he holding rests on the rationale . . . that [the federal law] seeks to honor the employee’s choice of beneficiary, and any state attempt to redirect the proceeds conflicts with that objective and is therefore preempted.”

Briefly:

Tal Kopan of Politico reports on the Court’s denial of review in PG Publishing Co. v. Aichele, a First Amendment challenge to a state law limiting the ability of the press to cover elections from polling places.

In anticipation of the Court’s decision in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to California’s Proposition 8, the Human Rights Campaign has published a map showing the possible effects of the Court’s decision.

In an op-ed for the Austin American Statesman, David Gans discusses Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the challenge to that university’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions, including what he describes as the tension between the colorblind theory espoused by the more conservative members of the Court and the text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Disclosures: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys work for or contribute to this blog in various capacities, represented the American Association of Law Schools as an amicus in Fisher. Tejinder Singh, also of Goldstein & Russell, P.C., was among the counsel on an amicus brief filed by international human rights advocates in support of the respondents in Perry.

If you have (or know of) a recent article or post that you would like to have included in the round-up, please send a link to roundup [at] scotusblog.com so that we can consider it.

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices met for their December 9 conference; Honeycutt v. United States.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.